THE MONSTER OF MONACO

Princess Carline's husband is a drunken, thuggish brawler with a taste for brass knuckle dusters who is currently in an alcoholic coma. And, oh yes, but for a legal technicality, he would be sitting on the British throne.

FELLOW diners were horrified. Prince Ernst of
Hanover, the Queen's cousin and prominently in line
to the British throne, arrived at a fashionable
Japanese restaurant in London's West End in a state
of inebriation which would have been inappropriate in
a football hooligan.

'His three companions were obviously British toffs,' says one who
witnessed the scene. 'They arrived drunk, and they carried on drinking
until then were practically incapacitated.

'But it was the language that shocked everyone trying to enjoy a quiet
meal. I have never heard such appalling effing and blinding.*

Just an average night out, by all accounts for the 50-year-old German
prince who is married to Princess Caroline of Monaco.

But such nights have taken their toll: Ernst now lies in a coma and
dangerously near death with an alcohol-related illness in the Monte Carlo
hospital where his father-in-law. Prince Rainier, died last week.
Yesterday, as Rainier was laid to rest in Monaco's cathedral — where
49 years ago he married the American actress Grace Kelly — Monaco's
citizens were anxiously asking what
the future holds for the tiny
Principality with its colourful his-
tory and controversial personalities.

Monaco may be barely the size of
London's Hyde Park, a Ruritanian
irrelevance to most people, yet for
those international financiers who
live there tax-free thanks to the
closed books and draconian rule by
its medieval monarchy, the identity
of the person on the throne is of
immense significance.

And unless Rainier's bachelor son,
Prince Albert, finds a bride soon,
the next in line will be Princess
Caroline, now aged 48 and married
to the ungovernable Ernst, and who
has the children necessary to ensure
the continuance of the throne.

It is hard to think what more can
go wrong for the Grimaldis, the
oldest royal family in Europe.

For while Ernst may be an HRH in
his own right (Grimaldi royals are
only Serene Highnesses), on past
form it is difficult to imagine that, if
he recovers from his current serious
bout of pancreatitis, he will make
the perfect consort.

These days, multi-millionaire
Ernst is not even welcome in his
native Germany after he inexplicably urinated in broad daylight
against the side of the Turkish
government pavilion during a
Hanover trade fair, and ended up in
a £600-a-day drug and alcohol
addiction clinic in the Rheinland.

In the past few years, his violent
and unpredictable personality has
landed him with fines up to £350,000
and threatened him with jail
sentences for grievous bodily harm.

Last year, he kicked a female photographer in Austria, and set upon a
bar-owner on a Kenyan holiday
island with brass knuckle-dusters.
Ernst may be one of the most
impeccably bred people in Europe,
related to Queen Victoria and worth
as much as £450 million, but he is
surely also one of the world's most
boorish individuals.

The mystery is why Caroline, who
after her father's death is worth
nearly £1 billion, remains loyal to a
prince with more of an attitude
problem than Wayne Rooney.

The most compliant of Rainier's
three children, three-times-married
Caroline has, at least on the sur-
face, always taken her royal duties
more seriously than her siblings.

RAISED in Monte Carlo's pink
palace and educated at the
smart English public school
St Mary's Ascot, she has
described her upbringing as
boring but dutiful and, as such,
guaranteed to leave her with a sense
of guilt if she didn't do the right
thing.

Her Irish Catholic mother,
Princess Grace, daughter of a
Philadelphia builder, always had
high ambitions for her eldest child.
She dressed her in Givenchy from
the age of five and used to read from
the Almanack de Gotha, the conti-
nental Debretts, as she searched for
a husband for her. Grace half hoped
it would be Prince Charles.

But though Caroline, who is said
to speak six languages, has always
been known as Princess Perfect by
the 30,000 Monegasques who call
the Principality their home, she has also suffered from an identity crisis.

She spent her teen years as Eurotrash's leading bimbo, going topless
on the beach and dating a series of
unsuitable bon vivants, not sure
whether she should follow her
mother into the movie business or
become a singer, a simultaneous
translator or a journalist — she once
wrote a feature for Tatler.

She started a course at the
Sorbonne then dropped out, deciding to look after maladjusted children. This never happened, and
instead she flaunted herself round
various Paris nightclubs in the
Seventies, finally marrying an older
French playboy, Philippe Junot,
whom her parents loathed. It lasted
barely a couple of years and
Caroline was back on the market.

THEN in 1982, her mother was
killed in the mysterious car
crash on the high corniche
between Nice and Monaco,
and Caroline became her
distraught father's hostess on
public occasions.

Many were the pictures of the
beautiful princess leading the forlorn figure of her father through a
series of public appearances
designed to boost the fortunes of
the Principality, which Rainier had
rescued from its post-war tawdriness on his ascent to the throne.

But Caroline had not quite given
up the good life. She was already
pregnant with her first child,
Andrea, when, in 1983, she married
her real love, Stefano Casiraghi,
whom she had met at a Monte Carlo
disco. Prince Rainier breathed a
sigh of relief.

While no profound thinker, Italian-born Casiraghi had extensive
property interests and, it was
whispered, Mafia connections in a
Principality where nobody worries
too much about such things.

And finally there was a potential
heir to the throne. The couple had
two more children, moved into a
fairytale house and all seemed set
fair.

Yet she was not yet entirely comfortable in her high-profile role,
often confessing to confidants, 'if
only Albert, my brother, would get
married — to someone like Joan
Collins — I could retire'.

Tragically, in 1990, her husband
Stefano broke his neck in a powerboat accident. The so-called curse
of Monaco appeared to have struck
again. Moreover, her husband's
death posed a string of questions
about the reality of the gilded
couple's life together.

Not only was Stefano rumoured to
have been keeping a mistress, but it
also seemed that he had managed
to spirit away some of the money
that was Caroline's birthright.

Some say that after his death Caroline was forced to take the advice of a former boyfriend working in Wall Street on how to raise money against the value of her jewellery.

Whether from grief or necessity, she sold all Stefano's cars: his £500,000 Ferrari, his Harley Davidson motorbikes and his Rolls Royce.

Was it perhaps also partly a cash-flow problem that caused the young widow and heiress-in-waiting to move away from Monaco and. bring
up her children in less than vibrant
Saint "Remy in France?

Her companion there for a long
while was a Jewish actor, Vincent
Undon, a nervy man who blushed
whenever he had to deal with
strangers, and thus hardly the ideal
companion for a princess on
permanent show.

Caroline seems to have found life
so stressful at this time that she lost
all her hair and had to appear at her
father's functions wearing a wig.

Then she met Ernst August von
Hanover, one of the names her
mother had found in the Almanack
de Gotha and the next best thing
to Prince Charles. For had Britain
been subject to Sallic law, in
which women cannot inherit, Ernst
rather than the Windsors would
now be on the British throne rather than Queen Victorians descendants.

Ernst's qualifications were
impressive — at least on paper. He
had estates in Hanover and Austria, a holiday home in Lamu and a
£10 million town house in London.

Moreover, when the Berlin Wall
came down, he had also launched a
bid to get his hands on all the family
property the Soviets had appropriated in 1946.

He met Caroline ten years ago at a
London birthday party attended toy
ex-King Constantine of Greece and
the Duke of Marlborough. They
became close on a trip to Thailand
and Burma, then holidayed at his
island home off Kenya in 1996.

It was the same year that
Caroline's father was having to bail
his younger daughter Stephanie out
of her ill-advised marriage to bodyguard Daniel Ducruet because he
had been flaunting himself openly
with a nude model.

In the light of the repeated
scandals engulfing the hot-blooded
Stephanie, not to mention Prince
Albert's continuing reluctance to
wed, Ernst — a descendant of
George III and great grandson of
the last Kaiser — must have seemed
a lifeline of respectability to the
louche Grimaldis.

The only trouble was, he was
already married to a Swiss
chocolate heiress and the couple
had two sons.

This proved only a brief impediment. In 1997, Ernst divorced his
wife after 15 years of marriage.

Soon, Caroline had bought the
manor house just outside Paris of
designer Kari Lagerfeld from which
to conduct her new romance. She
became pregnant with their
daughter Alexandra, now five. While
her affair with her hot-blooded
suitor progressed, there were a
series of unpleasant clashes with
the media. Ernst was fined £30,000
for breaking the nose of a TV
cameraman outside his ancestral
pile in Hanover.

Back in Britain, he punched a
photographer on the pavement
while Caroline sat cowering in their
Bentley. Ernst was bound over for
12 months at a London court. He
was in feisty form throughout this
entire period, slugging and suing
and forking out the compensation.

He finally wed Caroline in January
1999. 'Thank God, at least he is one
of us,' Rainier said, still reeling from
having just banished the wayward
Stephanie from the palace and cutting her inheritance to £17 million
because of her unsavoury consorts.

Alas, Caroline's wedding present
from Ernst was not the settled,
moneyed, aristocratic life she might
have imagined would bring credibility to Monaco's 700-year-old throne.

First, Ernst, who is in a
state of ongoing warfare
with Germany's major
tabloid Bild, saw his family labelled Nazis, when
the magazine claimed
Ernst's grandfather had
profited from Hitler's
plunder of Jewish businesses in the 1930s.

Bild said Ernst's
grandfather had been
urging his loyalists in
Northern Germany to follow the Fuhrer as early as
1933 and that Ernst's
father had joined the SS

Ernst firmly countered
these accusations, but lost
out in his bid to claim the
Prussian estates seized during the war.

Apart from this, the couple
had a pretty nice if not
exactly dutiful life, skiing,
& cruising the Mediterranean and shooting boar.

Even so, Ernst's list of
misdemeanours has continued. He has been
banned for driving after
doing 131mph on a French
motorway, and accused of
giving an illegal Nazi salute
when a German security officer dared to inspect his
designer luggage as he boarded
a private plane.

Last year, he missed the
wedding ceremony of the
Spanish crown prince having
celebrated too much the night
before, only turning up half-way
through the wedding feast.
Now he is in hospital, very
probably as a result of his drinking
habits. He is being kept in a
medically induced coma to give his
body a chance to recuperate.

ACCORDING to his friends
in Germany, doctors have
been warning Ernst to cut
down on his drinking.
'There are probably ten to
20 functions a month that he has
been attending since he was a
teenager. It was always bound to
catch up with him and alter his
moods,' says one.

There are more disturbing
rumours, too, that Ernst's record of
violence is taking its toll on his wife.
After his last appearance in
Germany, the press asked: 'Does he
hit her, too?'

In Germany, there is a
groundswell of sympathy for Caroline. Reports say that although she
loves him, she is beginning to hate
the dark side that is showing itself
more and more.

What will happen if Ernst comes
out of hospital is anyone's guess.
Friends say his drinking has been
exacerbated by the very lifestyle
he espoused when he married
into the Monaco royals.

'Unfortunately, Ernst has found
living in the Grimaldi spotlight
almost impossible to bear,' says
one of his circle. 'He's
become obsessed with his
privacy and his drinking
has just got worse.'

Caroline, trapped once more
between love and duty, can only pray
— not for the first time — that either
her brother Albert shapes up, or her
husband does.

And what of the new generation?
So far, her children seem to be
following in the same familiar
footsteps as the rest of the dysfunctional family and may not provide
the dependable line Rainier so
longed for.

Andrea, Caroline's 21-year-old son,
was last heard of dating a car
dealer's daughter, while his beautiful sister, Charlotte, had fallen for a
man eight years her senior.